I'm thinking of getting one of these

http://www.linutop.com

and using it at home as a very low power web server for some low traffic web sites. The linutop 1 consumes <5 W and linutop 2 consumes <8 W.

Has anyone tried slackware on them? The wiki on that site says "coming soon" for slackware.

Not sure how your supposed to put slackware on it then. Or upgrade any of your software for that matter. I'm not familiar with the technology tho.

Just from what little I've read, I'm under the assumption that it's not meant to be altered, just used. Again, I'm ignorant about flash drives tho.

I'm under the same impression as jong357. I think by Slackware - "coming soon" they mean that they will make available a box with pre-installed Slackware (ie Slackware will take the place of whatever distro is on there now) in Flash memory. So I think you'll have to wait (unless you want to try overwriting the read-only memory, which is almost definitely possible but a little difficult, comparatively).

For 250Euro you can get quite a nice headless server which will be more powerful and you can run any OS you like.

Hmm, the wording is a bit misleading in places, but I think the brochure makes it clear that the internal flash can be updated and that 400 Mb is free for user software/data:

http://www.linutop.com/pdf/Linutop2_Data_Sheet.pdf

I'm interested in the ultra-low power and no noise, and being able to run slackware would be a very nice bonus for me

Say a lightly loaded headless server uses 80W and is on 24/365, then:

energy consumed/year = 0.001*80 x 24 x 365 = 701 kWh

Elec costs about £0.1 per kWh here in the UK (going up v soon!), so

cost/year = 701 x 0.1 = 70 GBP = 93 EUR = 138 USD

Linutop would cost a tenth of this to run per year.

Edit: PS 701 kWh of elec in the UK gives out 369 kgCO2

I'm using a Lemote Fulong as low-power home server.
I also installed Slackware on it.

Maybe but no noise = no cooling = low speed & short service life
How long will it really last if you use it hard?

I found this under the software tab on their site. So I think its a positive for a slackware install. I was thinking about getting a Linutop too, read an article about it on linuxtoday.com last week. Tempting...

That makes a whole lot more sense. I figured it was something like that. Who in their right mind would ever buy something to where you couldn't upgrade packages? Talk about security issues.

It would probably have to mount home/ on a rw tmpfs I would imagine but most everything else could be ro.

Those machines are most likely running a sort of 'LiveCD' type installation from a CF disk. You can probabyl find better deals from the puppy pc or damnsmall linux stores:

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/ShopPuppy

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/..._Small_Machine

Yes, the linutop comes with live xubuntu.

Comparisons are tricky and several reviews have criticised its lack of value for money - the strength of EUR against USD doesn't help either.

That said, at $475 this has similar CPU and storage specs but half the RAM and USB ports:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/..._Machine_Flash

I think a system with no moving parts is likely to be more reliable
than one with fans and spinning disks. One issue might be the write endurance of flash, hence the use of a live distro, but it seems that this is increasingly less of an issue, e.g.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

Zipslack perhaps? Is there going to be Zipslack for Slackware 12.0?

There will be no more zipslack. It requires the umsdos files system which is not supported by kernel-2.6.

Well now that is just a damn shame right there.

Yeah, I got away from the base install of debian on my Fulong as well. I just found that Lemote was not doing very many updates to the stream, so it just wasn't worth it to me.

But instead of putting Slackware on it like you did, I installed gentoo. Works like a charm, though you do have to do a bit of fiddling with the Xorg sources if you want to run version 1.4.x.